It's not a text editor. It's an IDE, with built in development environments, SDKs, deployment tools. Debug symbols for native binaries are often 2-4x the size o

It's not a text editor. It's an IDE, with built in development environments, SDKs, deployment tools. Debug symbols for native binaries are often 2-4x the size of the binaries themselves. > Consider that not long ago people were buying PCs with perhaps 10MB of hard disk - or even no hard disk at all Not that long ago in history, but an absolute eternity ago in computing terms. I have a direct internet connection to my home that is faster than the read write speeds of those computers. > Consider that with a thoughtful use of resources and an eye toward minimizing attack surface Attack surfaces have changed significantly since people were buying 10MB hard drives - you cannot write applications with the same security considerations from that time. > you can put a fully functional http/s app server in a 1.9MB package (redbean). The space is cheap, yes, but the attack surface is not. Firstly, redbean is the absolute extreme example of minimalism and portability. It's not "normal" it's an incredible feat of engineering frankly. Nginx isn't much bigger (~5mb) and caddy is bigger but still small (30Mb). The big difference between these and IDEs is that web servers dont provide client interfaces. For user facing tools they rely on web browsers to render html and interpret JS, so to make a comparison it's only fair to compare redbean + chrome to a Windows SDK install for example.